Debug builds

Since maintaining build configurations in Visual Studio is such a pain, I only have two. Unfortunately one of them had slowly become useless.

Day to day there are two configurations I need:

One for debugging, with maximum checks and optimisations off.

One for testing performance, with full optimisation and minimal checks.

I can live with the debug build having half the frame rate of the performance build. Beyond that the game becomes unplayable. It’s no good having all those checks if I can’t actually run the thing.

So I did something slightly unusual, and profiled the debug build. It turns out that having no optimisations was not the main problem; rather it was the debug iterators in the standard library.

This wasn’t entirely surprising. I used to have my own container classes for that reason, among others. But now I use the standard library all the time, because it is incredibly useful and too much work to replicate. It feels wrong to write C++ without it. But why are the debug iterators so slow? It seems that they lock mutexes on every operation, which seems unnecessary. Anyway, I can’t do anything about that, short of switching development environment. And I don’t want to turn it off, because it’s caught quite a few bugs already.

I found the worst cases and replaced iterators with pointers. I was using a vector as a dynamic vertex buffer. I wrapped it in a class and put in my own checks which don’t murder performance.

This got it back up to within a factor of two of the performance build. Hopefully it will stay there for a while.